It is either a blessing or a curse to be living in these modern times if you are enamored of gadgets. And I do love my gadgets. It is possible that I received this blessing, or curse, in my childhood. Every now and again Santa would bring an electronic kit needing assembly, and before you knew it, I had a collection of home-made gadgets: an AM radio, an analog computer, and my favorite, an AM radio transmitter. I believe I was infected then with the gadget bug, and have since lived with a bad case of gadget-itis.

I was born in the early 1950s, so what constituted a gadget has changed considerably during my lifetime. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the laser was the latest thing. It was The Death Ray, real Buck Rogers stuff, a thing of mystery. The first time I ever saw a laser in person was in the late ‘60s, at N. C. State University. The event was some sort of enrichment day for high school students, and we all were mesmerized by the collimated beam of coherent red light issuing forth from one end of the laser. Fascinating stuff. By now, everyone in America has owned at least three laser beams (I understand there are three in a CD player), and the technology no longer excites. People even use laser beams as pointers for overheads, which to me is a bit like using an atomic bomb to kill a cockroach: overkill.

I think it was during my sophomore year in college that the department received it’s first portable computer. It was a Hewlett-Packard, which was portable only because the CPU, and the compiler, and the paper tape reader fit nicely into a metal rack outfitted with coasters. We could thus roll it from room to room, and hook it up to the teletype machines scattered throughout the building. It was definitely during my sophomore year in college that I saw the very first of the pocket-sized electronic calculators. These, too, were Hewlett-Packard machines, specifically the HP-35 calculator. (I am ignoring the SR-10 calculator made by Texas-Instruments. The SR-10 performed only 5 functions: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and the extraction of square roots. Price tag: $125.) Every professor in the department received an HP-35 (price tag: $400 each). I wanted one badly, but couldn’t justify the cost until the next year, when two semesters of physical chemistry practically demanded that I have one. By then, the HP-35 had dropped in price to $300, because of the introduction of the newest model, the HP-45. Being a gadget guy, I of course bought the HP-45 (price tag: $400).

That was 1973. I still have the HP-45, and it still works. They stopped making battery packs for the device decades ago, and some years ago I tired of soldering Ni-Cad batteries together to make my own battery packs, so the 45 is officially retired. But you need to get a feel for the cost of gadget-itis. I spent $400 on a calculator that is inferior to the $13 calculators you now see on the end caps of the calculator row at Staples. The real indignity is that I can buy an iPhone app for the “vintage 45” for $0.99, and turn my phone into a 45. From $400 to $0.99, such is the sacrifice we gadget guys make in order to have the latest and greatest.

I suppose my worst experience with gadget-itis was in 1984. The VCR recorder was coming into its own, and I had to have one. But I didn’t want just any VCR. I wanted one that was portable, so that I could hook a camera into the recorder and make family films. That meant I had to have one that could run off an internal battery pack, in addition to running off standard AC. But more than that, I had to have a VCR that was highly programmable. I wanted programmability for weekly shows, daily shows, one-off shows, the works. I really didn’t need all this flexibility: I just wanted it. That is how I ended up spending $800 for a VCR, and another $800 for a camera. Christmas of 1984 was quite expensive.

In retrospect, I could have saved a few hundred dollars by buying two VCRs: one that was highly programmable but not portable, and one that was portable but not programmable. These are the mistakes we gadget guys make.

What has prompted these reflections is the condition of the battery in my iPhone 5S. The device holds a charge, and works for quite some time at what appears to be a steady discharge rate. But when the phone reaches some critical threshold value of charge, the battery life drops off drastically. Friends tell me this means the battery, and hence the phone, is on the back nine. I don’t know how much longer we will be together, but it probably will not be much longer. So I have to buy a new gadget.

But the thrill of buying a replacement gadget is gone. The 5S and I have been around the block a few times over the past five years, and I hate to part with him, especially if it means a change in my telephone-access habits. I hear the new iPhones don’t have a home key. The fellow at Best Buy reassured me that after an hour with the new iPhone I would be completely comfortable with it. I doubt it. This represents change, and as I have noted in the past, I’m no longer good with change. I haven’t been all that happy since Queen Victoria died.

So my transformation is complete. I am no longer the starry-eyed young gadgeteer, playing with his home-made AM radio transmitter and dreaming of laser beams. No, I am now the crotchety old geezer wondering why in hell Apple can’t make a battery that will last until I finally get around to kicking the bucket.

Teaching school is a great gig. I speak from experience: I’ve had other jobs that weren’t so nice. Where else, I ask you, can you get a job that requires you to work for only nine months, yet lets you draw a full year’s salary? I know some teachers complain about the extra hours they put in at home. You will not find me complaining about the hours. My other jobs often found me working at home, even during the weekends. I can’t tell you how many Labor Day or Fourth of July holidays were cut short because I had to travel to some place important for a meeting on the day after the holiday. My regular work week is 47 hours long, not counting commuting time, an improvement over some of my other jobs.

I enjoy the free time the job offers: two months off in the summer, two weeks at Christmas, a week for the midwinter break, a week for spring break, the two days for the fall break, and the holidays scattered throughout the year. My favorite season is summer, and it is glorious to have most of the summer off. The only problem I have is that the days off are set by the school calendar. I do not have vacation days that I can schedule when I wish during the school year. But that is a pretty small inconvenience, to be sure.

My days off tend to be hectic, as I try to fit in all the activities I never quite seem to find the time to do when school is in session. The recent Christmas break was no exception. I spent some of the break relaxing, but some of the break scurrying about, doing the things I ought to have done already. So it was that on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, 2018, I found myself in a checkout line in Wal Mart.

I was purchasing a cleaning kit for a project. I had one item: a box, containing all the cleaning supplies. As per usual, only four of the 16 or so checkout lanes were open, and there were lines at each of them. Under normal circumstances I would have gone to the self-checkout scanners, but there was a very long line there. I finally found the shortest line, at the “20 Items or Less” register. There were only two sets of customers in front of me.

Immediately in front of me was an elderly lady. Given that I am in my mid 60s, by “elderly” I mean someone considerably older, perhaps someone in her late 70s, possibly her early 80s. In front of the elderly lady was a fairly young family, father and mother with two young children. And this young couple was having a little trouble paying for the food that seemed to be the only items in the shopping cart.

The young mother was trying a credit card when I arrived in line. It was declined. She tried another card. Again, declined. The two children were getting antsy. The father pulled out a card. Declined. The couple didn’t seem to know what to do.

I was getting angry. It is a rule of sorts that the line I choose to enter will eventually become the slowest moving line. I glanced over at the self-checkout scanners. The line was very short. Those folks were getting through the process fairly quickly. Why does this always happen to me?

By the time I turned back to look again at the young family, the elderly lady in front of me had opened her wallet and pulled out a $100 bill. She offered it to the lady working the cash register. And when the cash register attendant returned the change, the elderly lady shook her head, pointed to the young mother, and said “Give it to her.” The young mother tried to refuse, but the elderly lady wouldn’t have it. The grateful and embarrassed young family moved on.

When the young family had gone, I said to the elderly lady, “You really are a very kind person. Thank you.” She said, “I have three children. I know what the week after Christmas can be like.”

I do not know her name, but she is one of my fellow citizens. She is a good person trying to do the right thing as her conscience dictates.

I really don’t care what she thinks of the President, or the Congress, or the wall, or impeachment. None of that matters. She and people like her – not the politicians – make America great.

Happy new year, y’all. I hope that 2018 treated you decently and that 2019 treats you even better.

There are many traditions associated with the arrival of a new year, most of which involve food. The one I observed for most of my life involved black eyed peas, collard greens, and cornbread. Last year I had to make a slight compromise, substituting Hoppin’ John for straight black eyed peas. What can I tell you? It was the only restaurant open in Beaufort, and it was a dive.

One tradition that I no longer engage in is the practice of making New Year’s Resolutions. I’ve made plenty of them over the decades, but I’ve only ever kept one. One year, I made a resolution to dispense with low-to-medium quality booze, and to drink only top-shelf Scotch whisky. Not only was I able to keep that resolution that year, but I kept it for many years thereafter. All the other resolutions fell by the wayside.

Most of the significant changes I’ve made were not as a result of a New Year’s Resolution. I did not wake up one January 1 and say, “Hey, this would be a good year to get married. I think I’ll make that a resolution.” No, it happened in a completely different way.

The same holds true for giving up the tobacco habit. I have known since before I picked up the evil weed in high school that smoking was not good for one’s health. That, of course, is the problem with highly addictive substances. You know they are bad for you, yet for some reason, you try them. After that, you get hooked. And I was hooked on tobacco. I came up with all sorts of justifications. I reasoned that most people have addictions of one sort or another, and the tobacco addiction was cheaper than heroin. (I’m not really sure that is true any longer.) How bad can the product be, given that it is still legal to sell in stores? On and on came the justifications, but in the back of my mind, I knew that one day I would have to give it up.

I tried several times to quit smoking. My most successful attempt lasted nearly 14 hours. I was well and truly hooked.

Several years ago I planned a trip to Australia. After combing through the airline schedules, I decided the best thing to do would be to fly to San Francisco, overnight with my daughter Katie, and then leave for Sydney from San Francisco. Under the best of circumstances, that would require me to go 19 hours without a smoke. With a little bad weather and other delays (for example, customs and immigration control), I could find myself without tobacco for 24 hours.

There was no way I could go that long without a smoke, knowing that one was waiting for me at the end of the flight. That old 747 would be putting down on some tropical island, the police or military would board the plane and haul me off for tampering with (i.e., destroying) the smoke detector in the lavatory. I would to this very day be languishing in some tropical paradise, making license plates, or picking up coconuts, or serving some other kind of punishment.

No, in order to make that trip, I had to quit for good. And I knew just how to do it.

In the summer of 2006, Chemical and Engineering News (a weekly publication of the American Chemical Society) ran a special report on methodologies for treating addictions of various types. I flipped over to the nicotine addiction report. It was dismal. Of all the treatments, the most successful had a one-year success rate of 20%. Although 20% is not a great success rate, it was the best option available, and I took it. And thus I chose Chantix, a smoking cessation product from Pfizer Labs.

My doctor was ecstatic, and told me that if I was serious about quitting smoking, I should take Chantix for three or four months. I agreed. That is, I agreed until I filled the prescription, and learned that my so-called health insurance would not cover any of the price of the medication. And a month’s prescription for Chantix was not exactly pocket change.

I started on Chantix about three weeks before the trip, and then had to make a decision. I would run out of the first month’s supply while in Australia. Thus, before taking the trip, I would have to decide whether to get the second month’s supply, or take a chance that I could make it after only one month on the drug. I took a chance, didn’t refill the prescription, ran out while in Australia, and never smoked again.

In retrospect, I believe the important element was the real desire to quit smoking, a desire I did not have in the past. I probably could have quit without Chantix, given that my mind was in the right place.

So, I do not make resolutions for the new year. This is not to say that I don’t have goals to achieve. One goal is to be a bit more regular in posting these blogs. I’m not making any promises nor taking any vows, but I will make an honest effort.

We have a rental property in Beaufort, South Carolina, and from time to time we have to pack up our tool kits and head to Beaufort to do a little work around the place. When we travel from Madison to Beaufort, we take the interstate to Augusta, grab the Bobby Jones Expressway, cross the Savannah River into South Carolina, and then take a series of back roads which eventually deposit us in Beaufort. This itinerary takes us through the Savannah River Site, which we affectionately call “The Bomb Plant”. We are not really sure what they do at this national laboratory, but given its proximity to a couple of nuclear power plants, we romantically assume it has something to do with radioactive elements and the bombs they produce.

I particularly enjoy the 18 mile trek through the Site because of the road signs. These warn me: not to stop (so why did you put a historical marker at the Barnwell County line, if I can’t stop to read it?); to beware of the wild hogs (since I drive through there at night, I hope they glow in the dark); not to stop; to stay in your car; to be careful of the dogs that are unleashed for the deer hunt; not to stop.

Wait a minute: a deer hunt? I’m confused. Do you shoot them from your car? Who gets to hunt deer on the property of a national laboratory?

Once we leave The Bomb Plant, we encounter a series of small towns: Allendale, Fairfax, Brunson, Hampton, Varnville, Cummings, Yemassee. The focus of this missive is the town of Hampton.

Some years ago, the AJC (Atlanta’s newspaper, know variously as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Al Jazeera Constitution, or The Atlanta Urinal and Constipation, depending upon your political perspective) ran an article about a fellow in DeKalb County who successfully challenged a speeding ticket in court. The basis of his defense was the radar license that the State Police issued to local law enforcement. In turns out that, in Georgia, the State Police issue licenses to local law enforcement that permit them to issue radar-based speeding tickets if, and only if, the speeder is doing 10 miles per hour or more above the speed limit. DeKalb County had nailed this fellow with radar at some speed less than 10 miles per hour above the speed limit. He won his case, and helped to wipe out a bunch of speeding tickets state wide. He is a hero.

(Before you get too excited, you should know there are some exceptions. The limit applies only to radar operated by local law enforcement. They can still nail you by following you and clocking your speed on their speedometer. The limit does not apply to State Police, who can get you for doing a half a mile per hour over the limit. And there is a very big exception for school zones, even during hours when the yellow lights are not flashing.)

Ever since, I have lived by the 9 miles per hour rule. When you see a posted speed limit, set your cruise control for a maximum of 9 miles per hour above the limit. When I have adhered to that rule, I have driven unmolested. When I have ignored that rule, I have invariably been ticketed. Although the AJC article addressed the state of Georgia only, I have assumed that a similar licensing arrangement must be true in other states.

Some time ago we were driving on a Friday night to Beaufort, for another fun-filled weekend of carpentry, plumbing, and yard work. We enjoyed our trek through the Bomb Plant, and through Allendale County. But then we entered Hampton County, and the trip lost its joy.

Our route did not take us through the heart of downtown Hampton, but on a road that might be considered a bypass. The speed limit signs are hard to see on that road at night, especially given that they do not do a good job of trimming the tree limbs that tend to cover the speed limit signs. Driving back through Hampton during the day, I was able to see the signs through the tree limbs reasonably well. That is not the case at night. (As an aside, Hampton is one of those towns that posts “Reduce Speed Ahead” signs about 20 feet in front of the new speed limit signs, both of which are covered with tree limbs.)

I slowed down to 44 miles per hour because there was a good bit of traffic on this strip. I assumed the speed limit was 45, given that it was a bypass of sorts, populated with gasoline stations and fast food joints. I discovered I was wrong when the blue lights came on behind me. I was doing 44 in a 30 miles per hour zone, and so I received a ticket. If you remember the movie “American Graffiti” you probably remember John’s reaction when he received a ticket: “File that under C.S.” he said, as he passed the ticket to Carol, who stuffed it into a door pouch full of tickets. I had a similar reaction, and filed the ticket in the truck’s C.S. filing cabinet.

I assumed the police officer was being nice: he said he would only charge me with going 39 miles per hour in a 30 miles per hour zone. Sometime during the night it hit me: if I was charged with doing 9 miles per hour over the limit, I could probably fight this in court. So, the next morning, I went out to the truck, opened up the C.S. file, and fished out the ticket. And there it was, printed clearly on the ticket: “39 mph in a 30 mph zone (44)” The 44 in parentheses was my actual speed, printed that way in order to remove that as a basis for fighting the ticket. I paid it online, and wrote it off as a bad experience.

That fall, when my auto insurance renewed, there was no increase in the premium. I assumed that the ticket information hadn’t had time to cross state lines. The next year, my premium was reduced, due to a good driver discount(!). The town of Hampton had plenty of time to notify the state of Georgia, but it didn’t. My premium has never increased on account of that ticket.

I have mixed feelings about this. One the plus side, the ticket did not affect my insurance, and that makes me happy. On the down side, there appears to be one reason only for failing to notify other states about tickets issued to their citizens. A town that does this tends to fly under the radar, if you will pardon the pun. It has a way of enhancing local revenues without generating massive protests from the affected population.

We have a description for towns like that. The proper term is Speed Trap.

Having moved the first 12 boxes of Christmas decorations from the attic to the hallway, I am reminded of a simpler time, a time when the Christmas tree was easy to decorate, and more importantly, easy to take down. I remember specifically the photo above, of my Christmas tree years ago, during the period of my bachelorhood.

In his 1990 autobiography, Ronald Reagan wrote that he was pleased when his hair finally turned gray, as it stopped reporters from asking if he dyed his hair. There is considerably less interest in the color of my hair, but now that the change in color is picking up steam, I, too, will soon be spared the “hair dye” question.

When people asked me whether I dyed my hair, I was aggravated, for two reasons. The first, I am exceedingly lazy. I am so lazy that I don’t even bother using conditioner, though everyone tells me I should. I am able to muster just enough energy to apply a little Brylcreem to my hair, and that’s that. Coloring my hair would require way too much work.

The second reason I get perturbed when people ask me about dying my hair is that the question presupposes that I find gray hair objectionable. I do not. Gray hair, whether in the form of streaks, salt and pepper, or the full-blown silver mane, tends to lend an air of wisdom and sagacity to the bearer. I could use that, from time to time.

I’m not sure what causes gray hair. Age, certainly, plays some role, but it can’t be the only factor. I have had friends go completely gray in their 30s, while people like Ronald Reagan make it into their 70s before turning completely. Surely genetics must play some role, but the extent of that role is unclear to me. My father was gray in his 50s. I do not know about my mother: only she and her hairdresser knew for sure.

In 2005 I was teaching at a boarding school in Dunwoody, GA. We had a week off for spring break, during which time I failed to shave. When the week of spring break was over, I decided to keep the beard, which was predominantly gray to white in color. I had a touch of salt and pepper at the temples, but the rest of my hair was brown. One day, in the Kroger I frequented every week, the little girl running the cash register asked me if I was eligible to receive the senior discount. I was 52 at the time, and so I answered “no.” She flushed. I recalled that my bank, First Union (otherwise known as FU), offered the senior discount at age 50, so I asked the girl about the age eligibility. I forget her answer, but it was somewhere in the distant future. I shook my head “no” again, and she began to turn red. After a little thought, I asked “It’s the beard, isn’t it?” At this point she turned cherry red, and checked me out as quickly as she could without giving me an answer. I went home and shaved the beard.

It is one thing to portray an air of wisdom and sagacity, but quite another to look several years older than I am.

I see more gray strands every day in the mirror, and that part of growing older is something I can live with.

In July of 1960, General Eisenhower had been President of the United States for seven and one-half years. His mood was light: the burden of office would soon be lifted, and he could retire to his farm in Gettysburg. He attended the Republican National Convention in Chicago that month with the idea that he would enjoy himself. Yes, he had to give a speech, but that was his only obligation. The rest of the work fell to his Vice President, Richard Nixon, who would soon be, officially, the Republican candidate for President of the United States.

Ike delivered a decent valedictory, recounting the state of the United States, paying tribute to the good, hardworking citizens of the country. He read the whole thing. Even though the TelePrompTer had been invented by then, it was clear from the YouTube clips of the event that Eisenhower wasn't using one. He did get a bit emotional at one point, but the bulk of the speech was read in that tidy, clipped, flat tone one associates with the General.

During the convention, Eisenhower mentioned that he kept pictures of four great Americans on the wall of his office. One of the pictures was that of Robert E. Lee. This revelation prompted a letter from a New York dentist, Dr. Leon W. Scott, to the President asking him why. The exchange between the two is given below.

At the Republican Convention I heard you mention that you have the pictures of four (4) great Americans in your office, and that included in these is a picture of Robert E. Lee.

I do not understand how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated, and why the President of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me.

The most outstanding thing that Robert E. Lee did, was to devote his best efforts to the destruction of the United States Government, and I am sure that you do not say that a person who tries to destroy our Government is worthy of being held as one of our heroes.

Will you please tell me just why you hold him in such high esteem?

Sincerely yours,

Leon W. Scott

Eisenhower’s reply is as follows:

August 9, 1960

Dear Dr. Scott:

Respecting your August 1 inquiry calling attention to my often expressed admiration for General Robert E. Lee, I would say, first, that we need to understand that at the time of the War between the States the issue of secession had remained unresolved for more than 70 years. Men of probity, character, public standing and unquestioned loyalty, both North and South, had disagreed over this issue as a matter of principle from the day our Constitution was adopted.

General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.

From deep conviction I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation’s wounds once the bitter struggle was over, we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.

Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.

This past summer marked the 40th anniversary of my graduation from graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill. My research group there was small: two of us were graduate students, and the third member of the group was a post-doc. The other graduate student, Ed, was a very interesting fellow. He had attended several graduate schools, and had settled on UNC as the place from which he would, reluctantly, finally, graduate.

Ed once upon a time was enrolled as a grad student at Stanford. At the time, Stanford had a whole stable of Nobel laureates in our discipline. Ed’s favorite memory of Stanford was standing in front of a urinal in the men’s room, relieving himself between two Nobel Prize-winning physicists.

Linus Pauling, the Nobel laureate in both chemistry and peace, was at Stanford when Ed was there. Pauling, you may recall, was an advocate for the idea that vitamin C could cure the common cold, among other things. According to Ed, Pauling kept a big apothecary jar filled with vitamin C on his desk. Students were encouraged to grab a hand-full of vitamin tablets, and to keep a log of their dosage and how they felt.

I haven’t kept up with research in that area, but the last I heard, there was absolutely no good scientific evidence that vitamin C does anything at all to reduce the length of a cold, or to alleviate the symptoms. I have heard of at least one study indicating that zinc gluconate works to some degree to lessen the severity of the common cold, but vitamin C appears to have a reputation that it does not deserve. Still, if you check my medicine chest, you will find packets of Emergen-C powder, each containing one gram of flavored vitamin C, ready to be mixed with water. Let’s just call that my superstition: I find it difficult to bet against Linus Pauling.

Although I no longer work as a researcher, it appears that I have stumbled across a research finding of extreme significance. I was able to restore my pre-calculus class to perfect health, and all in one day. It was so simple, yet so efficient, that I have to share the results with you. And it did not involve vitamin C.

I noticed that a fair number of seniors in the class were always absent due to illness on test day. The affliction affecting the seniors did not appear to be contagious, as the juniors in the class were unaffected. I suppose the seniors have suppressed immune systems due to the stress of applying to colleges. At any rate, it was very, very inconvenient. It was also unfair, as the seniors who skipped test day, but later took the test, scored better, on average, than the students who took the test on test day. That makes sense: they had more time to study for the test.

I gave a test last Wednesday on exponential and logarithmic functions. Several days prior to the test, I told the class the number and types of problems that would be on the test: three problems of this type, four problems of that type, etc. At the end of the review I asked the question: What type of problem is not on the test?

They replied, unanimously, “word problems!” It must be a universal truth that students who can solve a simple equation for x cannot solve the problem if it is posited in the form of a word problem. All my students hate word problems, and they really do not like the idea that I expect them to be able to solve word problems.

Back to my cure for the mysterious affliction that I will simply call “senioritis.” I informed the class that any student missing the test on Wednesday had best show up with a doctor’s note, preferably with photos of the compound fracture or surgical incisions that caused the absence. If they showed up with this documentation, they would be allowed to take the same test their classmates took.

If they did not show up with this documentation, they would take a different test, one of equal length to the original, but one composed entirely of word problems.

It was miraculous. My sickly senior class suddenly became quite healthy. On test day, I had 100% attendance. I thought that one student would end up taking the make-up test, as he did not make it to his main lesson block, nor did he show up for first period. But there he was, huffing and puffing as he sprinted to the door, coming into the classroom just under the wire, to take his second period math test.

I do not know how to transfer this miracle cure to other situations, such as poor attendance in the workplace, but in this one instance it worked like a charm.

I often hear students complaining about math. They ask the age old question “When will I ever use this in real life?” I now have one answer to the question.

I apologize for the delay in posting this blog. It has been awhile since my last post. I made the decision to transfer this blog from the Chile Today Hot Tamale website (as I rarely discussed anything to do with the business) to the website my son and I own, MrBatten.com. As it happens, we needed to do a little work on the MrBatten website, and I was not competent to the task. Fortunately my son, Jason, did the hard work.

(Arthur C.) Clarke’s Third Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Jason is, therefore, a magician.

Anticipation

I return to my last post, the one written in eager anticipation of the opening of a Dunkin’ Donuts in my home town of Madison, GA. My last post was written before its opening, and I was aggravated by the fact that the opening was postponed time and time again. I really needed a Bavarian Cream doughnut in the worst way, and these postponed openings were getting to me.

Disappointment

The store finally opened one Saturday morning, before dawn. I was there. Yes, I was crazy enough to set an alarm for a Saturday morning just to get my hands on a Bavarian Cream doughnut. And when I finally got to the counter (it was quite crowded) I discovered that this particular store had decided not to make the wonderful Bavarian Cream doughnut. I was crushed.

I made my displeasure known, in a civil manner, of course. I complained roundly to one and all about the audacity of a business not providing its finest product to an eager customer base. I knew that my complaints would fall on deaf ears: they always do. But I did register my gripe, and then tried to let go of my pain. But it is difficult to let it go when you drive past the store twice every weekday. I was losing what little serenity I possessed.

Redemption

Friday night I suffered an attack of ICD (ice cream deprivation). Surely you know the feeling one gets when nothing but ice cream will do, and there is none in the house. I convinced Kathy to go with me to Dunkin’ Donuts, as there is a Baskin-Robbins ice cream bar there. We ordered our ice cream, and, glutton for punishment that I am, I drifted over to the doughnut side of the business to look wistfully and the slot where the Bavarian Cream doughnuts should be. And what did I see? BAVARIAN CREAM DOUGHNUTS! My complaints had paid off. Or perhaps my complaints, along with the complaints of hundreds of other customers, had carried the day. I do not know why they suddenly appeared, but I do know that they made me a happy man. I bought all that they had left (a mere six), and had them completely polished off by breakfast time the next morning.

Frustration

This morning, on the way to work, I stopped by good old Dunkin’ Donuts. I decided that the faculty at the school really needed a box of Bavarian Cream doughnuts, and I was just the man to provide said box. I strolled into the store, and was gratified to see the display racks filled to the brim with freshly made doughnuts. There was one little problem, though. Not a single display rack was labeled. Row upon row of beautiful, fresh doughnuts, with no way to identify which was which. The young fellow who waited on me was a bit puzzled that the labels were gone, but he figured he could pick out the Bavarian Creams from the dozen or so other varieties of doughnuts that appear to be identical from the outside. And so I purchased a dozen, threw them in the pickup, and headed for work, so that I could sample this magnificent gift to the faculty.

As it happens, the young fellow sold me a dozen Vanilla Cream doughnuts.

I do not know why the store had to take down the labels. I do not know why the store had to fill the racks with unidentified doughnuts. And I still don’t know why, on opening day, they did not carry Bavarian Cream doughnuts.

And so, I am frustrated.

There may be a reader or two out there thinking about starting a business. Trust me on this one: the way my local Dunkin’ opened is not the way you should open. Eager anticipation followed by bitter disappointment is not a good business model.

This post originally appeared September 30, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

Very soon I will be 66 years of age, and I have spent 39 of those years (59%, if you are interested in the math) in small towns. I could hardly wait to escape the small town of my youth, but by the time we began to have children, the attraction of the city (Baltimore, at that time) began to fade. In the early 1980s, Baltimore was not the disaster area it is now, but it was clear that a small town environment would offer benefits that Baltimore could not offer. And so we moved.

The move back to a large metro area filled a void in my wife’s life; that is, the absence of shopping malls closer than 66 miles from home. But I had been spoiled, and reasonably soon after the split I found myself in the small town of Madison, Georgia.

Small towns may not be idyllic, but they are fairly close to it. The one drawback to a small town is the lack of places to shop. In Madison there are only two places (Walmart excluded) for men to buy clothes. There is only one office supply store. The hardware store closed down when the owner retired, so every little repair around the house now requires a trip out to Lowes. Don’t get me wrong, Lowes is a very fine store, and I’m happy that we have one in town, but I do miss the interaction with the owner of the hardware store, and his well-informed staff. I believe the nearest shopping mall is in Athens (29 miles) or Conyers (35 miles). (I don’t know for sure, as I try very hard to avoid those places.) The nearest gun range is in Monroe (23 miles).

Amazon has gone a long way to alleviating the shopping problem for small towns. I cannot find my favorite mouthwash in any store in town, so I order it through Amazon. Our one bookstore closed down several years ago, but the pain of that closing has been partially mitigated by Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook. (I still miss standing in the stacks, thumbing through a book, though. We do hit the Barnes and Noble in Athens on every trip there.)

But there is one shopping problem that Amazon cannot solve, and that is the problem of the missing Bavarian Cream doughnut.

I am almost embarrassed to admit this, but I prefer the northern Dunkin’ Donuts (Canton, Massachusetts) to the southern Krispy Kreme (Winston-Salem, North Carolina). My two great-great grandfathers who fought for the Confederate States during the late War of Northern Aggression must be turning over in their graves. Nevertheless, that is life. The doughnut in his highest form is the Bavarian Cream doughnut produced by Dunkin’ Donuts. (Their coffee is pretty darn good, as well.) Krispy Kreme offers nothing that comes close to the Bavarian Cream doughnut. And Madison does not have a Dunkin’ Donuts.

But we will soon. Or so they say.

A bit ago I read a notice in the local paper that we would soon have a Dunkin’ Donuts/Baskin-Robbins of our very own. That was around the same time that the local paper announced that we would soon get a Bojangles’ fast food joint. Well, Bojangles’ is here, open, and apparently doing a nice business. Dunkin’ Donuts, on the other hand, may or may not be here. The building has been finished, the parking lot is paved, and the landscaping (traditionally the last item on the construction list) is completed. But it isn’t open.

I drive by the place every morning on the way to work, while it is still dark outside. The interior of the store is lit up every morning, but there are no people, and importantly, no doughnuts. Why do they wait? Don’t they realize that I am in dire need of a Bavarian Cream fix? Oh, the woes of small town life!

I am beginning to feel like Vladimir or Estragon, awaiting the arrival of Godot. Yes, I am waiting on Dunkin’, and the messenger continues to tell me that Dunkin’ will not be arriving today, but surely tomorrow.

This post originally appeared September 23, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

I have visited 49 of the 50 states (Alaska has eluded me thus far), and several foreign countries. In the course of my travels I have experienced lots of fascinating events: an earthquake in San Francisco, a live volcano in Hawaii, etc. But one event that never fails to fascinate me occurred last weekend, in my home state of Georgia. It was the return of the lovebugs.

We were at the Shrimp and Grits Festival on Jekyll Island, and the lovebugs were everywhere. The proper name for this insect is Plecia nearctica (for those of you who survived 10th grade Biology: thank you, Ms. Atwater!), and as creatures go, it is a relatively recent discovery. According to the Wikipedia article I consulted, these bugs weren’t fully described until 1940, but sightings of the bugs were reported as early as 1911, in Louisiana. That’s not that long ago.

Where were they until then? Urban legend tells us that the lowly lovebug was created in a lab, the result of a University of Florida genetics experiment gone wrong. The legend has it that Gator scientists were manipulating the DNA of insects in order to create a species to help control mosquito populations, and the lovebug is the result. I do not disparage the fine biologists at the University of Florida, but I have great trouble believing that they were manipulating DNA some 40 or 50 years before we even knew the structure of DNA. Actually, lovebugs prior to 1911 were in Central America, migrating northwards.

I first encountered these creatures nearly 30 years ago, in Baton Rouge. I was driving from Baton Rouge to Zachary, and these bugs formed great clouds on the highway. My rented car’s grille looked like it had been involved in a massacre, which wasn’t far from the truth. The locals told me that if the squished bugs aren’t cleaned off the car fairly quickly, their remains turn acidic, and the car’s paint job is the victim. I was thinking of that last weekend.

“Why are we here?” is a question that theologians and philosophers have been answering for millennia. Modern theologians tell us we are here to do God’s will. Why are the lovebugs here? That is a much more difficult question to answer, as they appear to do little more than copulate, produce eggs, and die on the grilles of cars. Seriously. These guys live only three to four days on average, during which time they mate, fly together still joined at the, er, hip (see photo above), lay somewhere between 100 and 350 eggs and die. They appear to serve no other purpose than to propagate the species, and make automobile paint shops wealthy.

I will continue to ponder the question as to why lovebugs exist. There must be a reason. Could it be that they exist only to show us that it is possible to die happy?

This post originally appeared September 8, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

Although the autumnal equinox is still two weeks away, I have seen three definite signs, over the last two weeks, that fall is already here.

Some of you know me only in my capacity as CEO of The O’Connor Group, Inc., the parent company of Chile Today Hot Tamale! (Don’t be too impressed by the title. Kathy gave it to me, and tells me it stands for “Carry Everything Out.”) I do have another job, that of a high school math teacher, and one of my duties at the school is to supervise the morning drop-off of the eager young minds that parents entrust to our care. For the past two weeks there has been a definite touch of fall in the early morning air. I know that sounds silly, given that afternoon temperatures are still in the 90s, but the foretaste of fall is unmistakable.

The second sign I saw this morning as I was mowing the lawn. [My very first paying job was mowing our lawn (and the vacant lot next door that we were allowed to play on, if I may be allowed to end a sentence with a preposition). For that work I was awarded the magnificent sum of 25 cents, which would stay in my possession just long enough for me to hop on my bike and pedal to Wade’s Five and Dime, where I exchanged the whole two bits for bubble gum baseball cards. That is probably the only reason why I can now remember most of the starting lineup of the 1961 New York Yankees. It seems that I have not made much progress in the last 57 years, given that I am still mowing the lawn, but now without getting paid even 25 cents for it.] There are leaves everywhere on the ground! I have seen this early loss of leaves in previous years, but those were drought years. We have had a good bit of rain this summer, and Lake Oconee appears to be at full pool, so I can’t imagine that we are suffering in a drought. No, fall is definitely sneaking up on us.

The third sign involves a common insect that I spent a lifetime referring to as the “cockroach”. The denizens of the coastal portions of the southeastern United States refer to these creatures as “palmetto bugs”. I admit that “palmetto bug” sounds much nicer, so that is the term I will use. Recently, I have seen a fair number of palmetto bugs attempting to, and sometimes succeeding in, entering the house. They are relatively easy prey, as they are moving very slowly. None thus far has escaped the fate that I have in store for the lowly palmetto bug, namely, the thermonuclear tennis shoe. But this invasion of an alien species is a sure sign that fall is here. I have seen this in the past. The insects, in preparation for a change in the season, seek the comfort of our little home.

I have been vocal about the fact that my favorite season is summer, followed by spring (because it leads naturally to summer). But fall has its nice features. Fall is the season for festivals, celebrating everything from bar-b-cue (The Bar-B-Cue Festival, Lexington, NC) to apple harvests (there are many around the country, including the national festival in Arendtsville, PA, and my favorite, the Shenandoah Valley Apple Harvest Festival in Winchester, VA, hometown of Patsy Cline) to shrimp and grits.

Speaking of Shrimp and Grits, the 2018 Shrimp and Grits Festival will be held next weekend at Jekyll Island, Georgia, beginning Friday, September 14 through Sunday, September 16. This festival was voted the best festival in the southeastern United States. We attended in 2016, and we can see why it received such an accolade. The festival was canceled last year, courtesy of a hurricane (Hurricane Irma, I think), but it is back this year, and Kathy and I are looking forward to participating once again in a celebration of two fantastic foods, grits and shrimp. As it happens, we know of a hot sauce, containing garlic, that is a perfect accompaniment to this delicacy.

So, if you are in the vicinity, come see us. Enjoy beautiful Jekyll Island, enjoy the music, enjoy the food, and enjoy the crafts. In other words, enjoy the fall.

This post originally appeared August 19, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

Once upon a time, I was the very best customer for Breyers Extra Creamy Vanilla Ice Cream in the world. That ice cream is not only delicious, but it also provides a velvet-like feel to the tongue. It is, in short, the perfect taste treat.

I haven’t bought any in close to two years now, because two Christmases ago, my step-daughter gave me an ice cream maker. I brushed up on the physics and chemistry of making ice cream, and came up with a recipe that is absolutely delicious. It lacks that feel that the Extra Creamy provides, but the ice cream is excellent, and, if you are into the all-natural thing, the ingredients will make you happy: 4 cups of heavy whipping cream, 3 cups of Half and Half, 1 ½ cups of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract from Madagascar vanilla beans. Use those ingredients in the ratios provided above, follow the specific instructions for your particular ice cream maker, and you will move a floor or two closer to heaven.

A year or so ago, I tried to branch out. It didn’t work too well. Have you ever had homemade peach ice cream? If you have, you know that the chunks of peaches get frozen, and tend to ruin the texture of the ice cream. I had a brilliant idea: why not use a peach jam instead of cut up sections of peaches. Better still, why not use Chile Today Hot Tamale’s Georgia Peach Pepper Jam (which you can purchase here)? The advantage to using a jam is that the chunks of peaches are smaller, and more homogeneously distributed throughout the jam, which gives it a good chance of being distributed throughout the cream. And the nice thing about using George Peach Pepper Jam is that the casein from the milk products will temper the capsaicin from the pepper, resulting in a nice taste without a painful burn.

That experiment didn’t work out very well, as the jam settled to the bottom of the ice cream maker. Clearly I needed to use a blender on the jam before adding it to the cream. But before I could try to do that experiment over, another one occurred, which produced great results.

A couple of weeks ago, some of the kids and one grandchild came for a visit, and I prepared for the visit by making a batch of ice cream. But I did something different that changed the feel of the ice cream. You know how it is impossible to sweeten iced tea with sugar? The tea is so cold that the sugar just doesn’t dissolve. This began to worry me, as I was adding sugar to cold whipping cream and cold Half and Half. Was I getting the maximum sweetness out of the sugar? So I borrowed Kathy’s monster blender.

Most mornings, Kathy blends up some sort of concoction which, I suppose, goes by the name of “smoothie.” It is a mix of milk, honey, frozen fruit (strawberries, blueberries, etc.), and probably some other healthy stuff I don’t want to know about. In order to break the frozen fruit down into a nice smooth drinkable mixture, she uses a blender that is nearly industrial strength. Nothing frozen can survive the high speed rotation of the blades. It occurred to me that this would be an ideal way to disperse the sugar: put both the whipping cream and the sugar into the monster blender, and flail away. And so I did. I deposited the blended mixture into the ice cream maker, plugged it into an outlet, and added ice and salt.

My ice cream maker stops when the ice cream becomes viscous. This normally takes less than an hour, say 45 or 50 minutes. That day, two hours after starting, the ice cream maker was still churning and churning. I had to investigate, because this just wasn’t right. So, when I stopped the maker, I found that I had nice, solid ice cream that scooped very easily because of the low viscosity. Best of all, it had the velvet feel of Breyers Extra Creamy. Apparently the blender injected a good bit of air into the ice cream, and that created the velvety feel that delights the tongue.

Then I asked the question: why not try this approach with peach ice cream? Using the exact same recipe given above (including the vanilla extract), I added one nine-ounce jar of Georgia Peach Pepper Jam by Chile Today Hot Tamale (did I mention that you can buy it here?) to the mix, fed it into Kathy’s monster blender, and made a batch of ice cream. Knowing that it would most likely not become viscous enough to make the ice cream maker stop of its own accord, I pulled the plug after an hour of mixing.

It is delicious. The peach flavor is subtle, not overpowering, so if you prefer a very potent peach flavor, you may want to try adding two jars of Georgia Peach Pepper Jam by Chile Today Hot Tamale (which, coincidentally, you can buy here). The most pleasant aspect of this ice cream is that the casein in the milk products did not completely neutralize the capsaicin from the habanero pepper. It is a bit strange, eating a frozen product that produces a gently glow as it slides past the tongue. I like it!

Just remember that when you transfer the ice cream to a container for the freezer, do not fill the container all the way up. The ice cream will expand a little upon freezing. Fill the containers no more than 90% full.

Now, please excuse me, as I have to go to the grocery store. You see, the other thing I’ve been craving this weekend is some nice, cold watermelon.

This post originally appeared August 11, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

The Sheppard murder mystery began on the Fourth of July, 1954, in the town of Bay Village, Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland), with the brutal murder of Marilyn Sheppard, the pregnant wife of Dr. Samuel H. Sheppard, a handsome 30 years-old osteopathic surgeon in practice with his father and two brothers. She was beaten to death with a blunt object while in her bed upstairs, probably around 4:00 or 4:30 in the morning. Sam, a heavy sleeper, had fallen asleep downstairs, but was awakened by her cries for help. He rushed upstairs, where he was knocked unconscious. Coming to a bit later, he heard the perpetrator downstairs, and rushed to confront him, chasing him down to the shore of the lake. Sam was once again rendered unconscious. When he came to, her returned to the house, determined that his wife was dead, checked on his seven years-old son “Chip” (Sam Reese Sheppard, asleep and undisturbed in a nearby room), and then called the one telephone number that came to mind, that of a neighbor who also happened to be the mayor of Bay Village.

Later that year Sam Sheppard was convicted of second-degree murder. He was convicted in one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice ever committed in these United States.

The coroner, who arrived quickly on the crime scene, was well aware that most murders of wives were committed by husbands, and took this as proof enough that Sam was guilty. He never looked for any exculpatory evidence. He convinced the detectives investigating the murder that Sam was the only suspect. The detectives impounded the house, taking the keys and allowing no one in without police supervision. They did allow Chip’s uncle and aunt to come pick up clothes for the boy, who was now staying with them. The keys were not returned to Sam’s attorney until a couple of days after his conviction.

Had the forensic expert hired by the defense been allowed in the house prior to the trial, it is possible that the outcome would have been different. For one thing, the blood spatter on the wall was only partially Marilyn’s blood. There was blood from another person, not Sam. The fact that two of Marilyn’s teeth had been broken led the defense attorney to believe that she had bitten the finger of the assailant so hard as to draw blood. When the attacker withdrew his or her finger forcefully, it broke the two teeth. An analysis of the wounds and the splatter pattern of the blood indicated that the attacker was left-handed (Sam was right-handed), and probably used a three or four cell flashlight as the murder weapon. (The coroner, who had it in for Sam, speculated based on an impression in the pillow, that the murder weapon was a surgical instrument, though no known surgical instrument left the impression found in the pillow.) Additionally, the murderer would have been covered in Marilyn’s blood (Sam was not). The coroner, thinking this a crime of spousal rage, did not even check to see if this was a sexual crime, even though the body was laid out in such a fashion as to indicate that she had been forcibly raped. (After the trial, the swabs taken but not analyzed at the time indicated sexual intercourse had occurred.)

Sam Sheppard suffered neck and spinal injuries during his tussles with the murderer that could have resulted in paralysis or death. The coroner, looking at x-rays but never having examined the patient himself, pronounced the injuries self-inflicted, contradicting the diagnoses of the doctors who actually examined Sam.

The trial was entirely unacceptable by modern standards. The presiding judge had admitted to a nationally syndicated columnist (who for some reason didn’t see the necessity of reporting it at the time) that Sam was “guilty as hell”, and this was before the trial had commenced. The request for a change of venue was denied, even though all three Cleveland newspapers had for months been trumpeting Sam’s guilt, sometimes in front page editorials. Murder sells newspapers, especially newspapers on a crusade to make sure that the man of wealth and privilege doesn’t get off. Worse still, the names and addresses of the jurors were published in the newspaper. The jury was not sequestered, except during deliberation, and even then at least one juror broke the law by engaging in a telephone conversation that was not monitored by the bailiff. (The verdict was rendered on December 21st, 1954. I can imagine a husband or wife on the phone saying “Everyone knows he’s guilty. Just vote ‘guilty’ and come home for Christmas.”)

All appeals having failed, Sam served 10 years of his life sentence. Then Sam’s defense attorney died, and his cause was taken up by a young lawyer named F. Lee Bailey. In 1966, the U. S. Supreme Court struck down his conviction, because Sam did not receive a fair trial. He was retried by the State of Ohio, and found not guilty.

Sam’s life was ruined. He lived less than four years after his retrial, dying of an encephalopathy associated with alcoholism. He eventually regained his license to practice surgery, but his skills were not what they once were, and his drinking did not help. Two patients he operated on died as a result of his malpractice. He ended his life as a professional wrestler. He was 46 years old when he died.

Likewise, his son’s life took a very different course than it should have. He was robbed of both his mother and his father during his formative years. He did sue the state of Ohio for wrongful imprisonment, which for some reason required yet another trial. In order to recover money from the state, Sam had to be found “innocent”. The 1966 retrial had found him “not guilty”. Apparently, there is a distinction.

The state of Ohio remained obstinate to the end. In 2000, the jury of eight refused to find the defendant “innocent”.

The house in which Marilyn Sheppard was murdered was torn down in 1993 to make way for a new home, one less engulfed in gruesome history. The photo at the top of this blog is from the day the deconstruction began.

It is a sad story. There is no logical reason why I should be so fascinated by it.

This post originally appeared July 22, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

Last Friday, July 20, 2018, marked 49 years since man landed and walked on the moon for the first time. That event remains the most remarkable of my lifetime.

At the time of my birth, there did not exist anywhere in the world a rocket capable of placing a satellite into orbit. The existing rockets simply did not have the power to lift such a payload that far. Yet, shortly before my fifth birthday, Sputnik 1 entered Earth’s orbit. Mankind finally began to penetrate the frontier of space. And not quite 12 years later, we hit pay dirt: we visited, and safely returned from, another object in our solar system.

The first landing was Apollo 11. NASA had sufficient hardware to go through Apollo 20, but the moon had lost its draw, and the budget cuts began. NASA pared the program back, ending it with Apollo 17. President Nixon wanted to kill the program after Apollo 15, but OMB Deputy Director Caspar Weinberger managed to talk him out of it. Mankind left the moon on December 14, 1972. We have not returned since.

The 16 year old George, watching the first lunar walk on that Sunday night 49 years ago, never would have believed that he was watching the high point of manned space exploration.

The 46 years since our last visit to the moon has seen tremendous progress in unmanned space exploration. The Mars Rovers are great successes, though we may be seeing the end of life for Opportunity, a 15-years-old rover designed to work for a bit more than 90 Earth days on the Martian surface. It is currently powered down, waiting out a massive dust storm on the surface of Mars that is expected to go on until September. The Hyabusa mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid was a remarkable success, as was the recent New Horizons flyby of Pluto, which, by the way, is still a planet in my book.

But manned spaceflight? I don’t see the successes with this side of the program. We have gone back and forth to the International Space Station many times since the first piece was orbited 20 years ago, losing 14 astronauts along the way in two space shuttle disasters. What did we learn from all this? And how could we claim any success now that we have to rely on launch vehicles from another country to ferry our astronauts back and forth?

We can do something about this. Three programs are eating NASA’s budget: the Space Launch System (SLS), the Orion capsule, and the Lunar Orbiting Platform-Gateway (LOP-G). I cannot summarize these programs any better than the summary from Bob Zimmerman’s http://behindtheblack.com/ posting, which I reprint below:

What’s killing America’s human access to space? Three projects: a rocket called the Space Launch System, a capsule called the Orion, and a new project called the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway.

These three programs are political boondoggles, pork, pie in the sky, jobs programs disguised as space programs. The Space Launch System, for example, is touted as the biggest rocket ever built. But its $30 billion development cost is eating up almost all of NASA’s human budget for deep space. Compare that $30 billion with the cost of developing Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy—less than a billion dollars. In other words, for the cost of developing the Space Launch System, we could develop thirty brand new rockets if we took the Elon Musk route. Or we could develop an entire Moon and Mars program.

After thirteen years of promises, the Space Launch System has never flown. And when it does, it will cripple NASA. The cost of one launch will be between one and two billion dollars. For that price, you could buy between eleven and 22 launches of the Falcon Heavy. You could buy the launches for an entire Moon and Mars program.

What’s worse, after the launch of each Space Launch System rocket, we will throw the exorbitantly-priced rocket away, then we will be forced to buy another one. Meanwhile, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are making rockets reusable. And reusable rockets, like reusable busses, trucks, trains, cars, and airplanes, will lower our cost of access to space dramatically.

Then there’s the Orion capsule that the SLS will fling into space. It cannot land. It can’t land on the Moon. It can’t land on Mars. And it’s too small to carry crews to Mars. It is a boondoggle.

Topping it all off is the Lunar Orbital Platform – Gateway, another nipple in the mouth of the Space Military Industrial Complex, another make-work program. It is a mini space station orbiting the moon. It’s useless and can’t even be manned or womanned year-round. But it will cost so much to build that we’ll never be able to build lunar landers. We won’t touch down on the moon. We’ll simply circle the moon from a distance and watch with frustration as the Chinese land human beings. [emphasis in original]

The last point about LOP-G is especially important. It is designed not to promote the exploration and settlement of the solar system, but as a kind of purgatory where the U.S. will remain trapped in lunar orbit, accomplishing nothing, while other nations land and settle the Moon.

I have signed the petition, and I encourage you to do the same. Let’s stop the waste of tax dollars, and get serious about manned space exploration again.

This post originally appeared July 6, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

The summer is going by so quickly. That much hasn’t changed since the dark and dismal days of my youth. In about a month I will be back at school, declaiming on the wonders of mathematics and physics.

Despite the heat, the wildfires, the humidity, the floods, the divisiveness in our political discourse, and the fact that Tractor Supply still can’t seem to produce the latch that I ordered (and paid for) back on May 21, I am having a good summer. I’m spending it with an old friend.

A qualifications is in order. Although Kathy is my dearest friend, I am not referring to her. She is not “old” and thus does not qualify. (Whew!)

The friend is Euclid (fl. 300 BC). I was introduced to Euclid back in the 1960s, but ours was a shallow friendship until the early part of this century, when I began teaching geometry. At that point I began to appreciate his genius.

Euclid gave his name to a branch of geometry, and for his insight into geometry he is revered to this day. But if you open his text, “The Elements of Geometry,” you will find that only seven of the thirteen books deal with geometry, either plane geometry, or solid geometry (including a treatment of the Platonic solids). The other six books represent, to me, the most fascinating aspect of Euclid’s work. In them, he deals with a variety of mathematical topics (quadratics, proportion, number theory, irrational numbers) in an era before the discovery of algebra. He does so the only way he knows how: geometrically, using a straight edge and a compass.

One example should give you an appreciation of just how difficult it was to do math in the days before the discovery of algebra. The picture at the top of this blog is from Euclid’s Book II Proposition 4, which reads: “If a straight line be cut at random, the square on the whole is equal to the squares on the segments and twice the rectangle contained by the segments.” His proof is logical, each step along the way is justified, and the whole thing takes about a page in the textbook to prove. Given our knowledge of algebra, we would instead write

(x + y)^2 = x^2 + 2xy + y^2

and the proof would hardly take a full page in a textbook.

I used Euclid’s textbook for the past several years in my geometry classes. The students found it a heavy slog to read, so I began translating Euclid into more modern English, and along the way used liberal doses of algebra. The order of the propositions, or theorems, in Euclid did not depend upon any knowledge of algebra, so when we apply algebra to his theorems, we find that his propositions are not in the order we would present them today. That was a problem.

I’ve looked at other textbooks, and while they are fine in their own ways, they seem to me to stray a tad bit far afield from the classic text, Euclid’s “Elements”. So, finding no suitable alternative, I began writing my own textbook, a variation on Euclid. It adheres to the basic text, but juggles the order a bit to make the information presented seem a bit more logical, especially as the book uses algebra where possible.

I figure I’m halfway through. I should have the whole thing finished in another year or so. (It usually takes me 18 months to write a book.) There will be errors to correct, problems to solve, and lots of feedback from my students to help me polish the book off. But I must confess that spending all my free time for the last couple of months in the company of Euclid and his remarkable mind has been a most enjoyable aspect of the summer.

And it appears that the fun will not end. I have been asked to teach a course on the mathematics of Descartes, and I agreed enthusiastically. I was introduced to Descartes decades ago, but I haven’t spent the quality time with him that I have with Euclid. I’m excited about getting to know him better.

Which reminds me of a joke: Descartes goes into a bar, orders a drink, and guzzles it down. The bartender says “Would you like another drink?” Descartes says, “I think not,” and, in a puff of smoke, disappears!

This post originally appeared June 28, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

Part 1

A few weekends ago, Kathy and I attended a baby shower in Asheville, at The Grey Eagle. They don’t normally hold baby showers at The Grey Eagle, as it is a music venue, but the owner is friends with the parents-to-be, and so it happened. A couple of summers ago, I saw Don Eason and his excellent Allman Brothers tribute band, Idlewild South, at The Grey Eagle, so I was thinking of Don as I entered. Sure enough, I discovered that Don and his band had been there just the weekend before the shower.

A friend once told me that Don had owned a bar in Chapel Hill, sometime after my days at UNC. It occurred to me that Don never knew the role I played in the success of his bar. I suppose I should tell the story.

During the time I lived in North Carolina, it was tough to get a mixed drink. If a county or city voted to allow alcohol sales in the jurisdiction, it was limited to beer and unfortified wine in grocery stores, gasoline stations, or bars, and hard liquor only in state controlled ABC stores. You could get a beer at dinner, but not a scotch and soda. The one exception was the Brown Bag law: if a restaurant had the proper license, you could bring your own bottle, turn it over to the waiter, and then have the waiter serve you mixed drinks, out of your bottle, for a set-up fee. This of course caused problems if a group of, say, four people were going out to dinner, and each member preferred a different libation.

The other problem with brown bagging was an unintended consequence. Once the seal on a bottle of liquor was broken, it could not be transported in the passenger compartment of a car. You could transport the opened bottle in the trunk of a car, but for some reason, that didn’t seem to be as appealing as killing the whole bottle at dinner, resulting in more DUI arrests than should have happened.

Around the time I was finishing up at Chapel Hill, North Carolina changed its drinking laws so that local municipalities could vote to allow “liquor by the drink” instead of “liquor by the bottle.” Therein lies my tale.

I believe the “local option liquor by the drink” election for Chapel Hill was held in October of 1978. I don’t remember the exact date. I do know that it was on the day that the moving van was packing up our little apartment for the move to Maryland and my first professional job. After the moving van was packed, I strolled over to the church behind the apartment (no longer there), our polling place, and cast my vote for the proposition. I then hopped into my Fiat and drove away, never to return as a student, and very seldom to return as a visitor.

So, Don, to the extent that a few mixed drinks contributed to your success, I’m happy to have helped!

Part 2

I finally met the surgeon who will remove my cataract, and we got along just fine. After a bit of conversation, we discovered that we were both at Chapel Hill at the same time: he was an undergraduate student while I was a graduate student. Further, he was an undergraduate taking a chemistry course I taught. The dates suggest that he could well have been my student. (The odds are not great, though: a lot of grad students taught freshman chemistry labs, as UNC graduated more bachelors degree chemists than any other school in the nation at that time.) Of course, my first thought was “Did I treat this guy right, or was I an arrogant jerk?” The doctor’s first thought was “Did I behave as a typical obnoxious pre-med student, or was I okay?”

We laughed. Neither of us remembered the other, so I suppose it doesn’t matter. It is funny, though, that our first thoughts were of past behavior. Both of us wondered whether our behavior then met our current standards. It never would have occurred to me back then that I would be asking such a question today.

So, here is some advice, free for the taking. Always treat others as if, one day, they will be holding a sharp object next to your eyeball.

This post originally appeared June 21, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

Last week I left out the most useful household hint of all. I hate ironing, and don't really want to know anyone who enjoys ironing. In the course of my bachelorhood, I examined every possible avenue to avoid ironing. First runner up is, use a steamer. This works very well, but it requires that you buy a steamer. So the very best way to take wrinkles and whatnot out of your clothing is to throw the wrinkled piece in the dryer with a wet hand towel. Let the dryer do your steaming for you. Take it out immediately upon the end of the drying cycle.

My dirty clothes bag has a hole in it. It isn't a very big hole, but start with a small one, and sooner or later it becomes a big one. This is the second problem I've had with that clothes bag. A bit ago, the tie cord dry rotted, so I no longer had a way to close the bag. Now this. Why don't things last anymore? I received that clothes bag as a high school graduation gift, in the spring of 1971.

Kathy gets a little irritated with me because I seldom write about our excellent line of chile pepper sauces and pepper jams. Every now and again I do sneak a little advertising into the blog. Last week I cleverly mentioned George's Gourmet Pepper Sauce in the blog (and it is a truly delicious, reasonably mild, sauce), and I may have mentioned recently that we will be at the Highlands Village Square Arts and Crafts Show in Highlands, NC, this weekend. I decided that a good compromise would be an article on food and food preparation. We have used a couple of the food delivery services, and I am very high on Blue Apron. So my plan was to do an article on my experience as an in-home Blue Apron chef. But then I changed my mind.

Summer has now officially arrived, and I write this on what will be the longest day of the year. I freely confess that summer is my favorite season. In addition to exposure to beautiful weather, I have, in theory, some time off from work. I haven't actually seen any time off from work yet, but hope springs eternal.

There is a fair amount of history in this state, some of it fairly close by. On my list of places to visit this summer are:

(1) Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, just about 40 miles from here. This will be a tough one, as it is only open 4 days a week, and then for only 2 hours each day. But I do want to see the home of Flannery O'Connor, so I will figure a way to sort this out.

(2) Warm Springs, about 100 miles away. I'm not sure what there is to see there other than Roosevelt's Little White House, but I want to go nonetheless.

(3) Crawfordville, about 40 miles from here. I've actually been to Crawfordville, but that was just driving through one day on my way to Beaufort. (I was avoiding interstate highways that day.) Crawfordville is in Taliaferro County (named for Benjamin Taliaferro), and in keeping with the family pronunciation, it is pronounced “Tolliver” County, as in “Oliver.” According to the database “Georgia's Biggest Ticket Traps”, the county pulls in around $1614.33 per capita in revenue from speeding tickets. (The statewide average is $105.48; the average for the five county metro Atlanta area is $116.97.) According to the Census Bureau, and the University of Georgia, the largest employer in the county is government, and the largest component of the government is the Taliaferro County Sheriff's Department.

But I am not interested in visiting there because I need another speeding ticket. Taliaferro County was home to Alexander H. Stephens, who, among other things, once taught school here in Madison “for four months of misery”. The “other things” include being a Congressman, an appointed Senator (though the Senate refused to seat him), a Governor, and the only Vice-President of the Confederate States of America. Not too far from Crawfordville is Robinson, GA, home to Henning Murden, gunsmith to the Confederacy.

While we are on the subject of Georgia, its towns and counties, I have a question. Why are the cities that have the same names as counties NOT in those counties? Examples: Clayton is in Rabun County, not Clayton County; Decatur is in DeKalb County, not Decatur County; Madison is in Morgan County, not Madison County; etc. There are a few exceptions (Greensboro is in Greene County), but these are quite rare.

This post originally appeared June 16, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

It appears that I have a very good immune system. I attribute this to a job I once held for something like 11 years, which involved an idiotic amount of travel, primarily air travel. Just imagine averaging somewhere between 4 and 6 flights per week, trapped in an aluminum tube with an atmosphere that is approximately 85% recirculated air. Someone sneezes in 36D, and within minutes, those viruses and germs are coming out of the air vent over 2B. Or imagine a hotel room, prepared by a cleaning staff that just wants to get this room cleaned quickly, but not necessarily thoroughly. Or imagine what goes on in the kitchens of the restaurants you dine in. Better yet, let's not think too much about that.

I suspect that I have been exposed to most of the germs and viruses that afflict the general population. My survival tells me that my immune system, probably because of all this exposure, is in pretty good shape. I seldom get sick, and when I do, it is seldom very bad. Thus have I avoided doctors.

Unfortunately, a good immune system cannot cure a cataract, and in order to have the surgery next month, I needed a pre-surgery physical exam this month. That happened Tuesday. The result was shocking.

They ran an EKG. An EKG checks for heart disease, which presupposes that one has a heart. Apparently, I do. That will come as a great shock to a number of present and former students of mine, as well as to a few ex-girlfriends. And my heart is ready for cataract surgery.

The one physical ailment that has bugged me for the last two weeks is the set of gashes on my arm, courtesy of Lucy, the Devil Puppy. One day she came a-flying through the air, claws extended, and landed on my left arm. That resulted in some serious bleeding. It told me that it was time to trim her claws, which I did. But the clippers left the trimmed edges of her claws fairly sharp, so I used a trick I learned with Ronnie: I sanded them down with a Dremel Tool.

Then it hit me: the Dremel Tool is but one of those time-saving hints I've learned over the years. Why not share these hints with you? Remember the newspaper column “Hints from Heloise”? Somehow “Hints from George” just doesn't have that certain ring to it. “Hints from Herman” sounds better.

Clothes washing: Back in the 1960s, the madras clothing available seemed to have poorly fixed dyes. Wash them, and watch them run. There is no way that one would wash madras with any other item of clothing, for fear of coloring the other clothing. Those days, my friends, are gone. The past 50 years have seen advances by dye and fixative chemists, and I really haven't noticed any great running of colors. So, stop sorting whites and colors into separate piles. Save the Earth! Cut your water usage doing laundry in half! Wash your whites and colors together!

Exception: if you plan to bleach your whites, then do those clothes separately.

Cleaning neck ties: Every tie that I've sent off to a dry cleaner has been ruined, primarily because silk doesn't stand up very well to the high pressure used in pressing at these establishments. I learned to place my neckties in the upper rack of a dishwasher, and hang them up promptly when the cleaning cycle is completed.

Vacuum cleaners: If a man owns a Shop Vac, he does not need to own a vacuum cleaner. This one needs no explanation.

Blood stains and other water-based tough-to-remove stains: Hydrogen peroxide is a great cleaning agent. It can remove blood stains and other difficult stains (such as a George's Gourmet Pepper Sauce stain) from clothing, without bleaching the underlying fabric. Try it on any stain of the sort. Yes, hydrogen peroxide is a bleach, but it is a relatively weak one.

General stain removal: I keep a series of solvents under the kitchen sink, which I use to remove stains and stickies. Here they are: Zippo or charcoal lighter fluid; toluene; Goo Gone; acetone (nail polish remover); ethyl acetate (non-acetone nail polish remover); isopropyl alcohol; hydrogen peroxide; ammonia; distilled vinegar; Hoppe's No. 9 Gun Bore Cleaner. The trick is finding which solvent works on which stain or stickie. It helps if you know a little bit about the problem. For example, if I'm dealing with a grease spot, I will try the lighter fluid or toluene first, followed by Hoppe's. For removing an adhesive, I generally start with isopropyl alcohol or ammonia.

This post originally appeared June 6, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

According to my calendar, the summer solstice is still 15 days away. According to the Australian lady I once dated, it is already winter in The Land Down Under, as the Aussies change their seasons at the beginning of the month. (They do not wait for the actual solstice or equinox.) But if you are a school teacher, or are married to one, you know when summer officially begins: it begins the day you no longer have to report to school in the morning. So, for me, today is the first day of summer.

I celebrated by sleeping in, until 6:00. It will take awhile for my body to ignore the 10-month-per-year habit of waking up at 4:45. It was a nice, leisurely morning, filled with coffee, a demonic whirlwind of a puppy, and a wife who laughs at everything our cute little puppy dog does, until the doggie decides to dine on her laundry.

I teach some 55 miles away from home. This I do by choice. I love where I live, and I love where I work. Unfortunately, these two places happen to be 55 miles apart, and so I commute. It gives me the chance to catch up on my podcasts, and on the morning commute, to listen to big band music. In the afternoon, I listen to the Kim Peterson Show on the radio. He is hilarious, and keeps me in stitches for the troublesome ride home.

The downside to this grand commute is that I have very little time at home during the week to get anything done. That changes during the summer. Already this morning I had a slow leak in a tire repaired. Later this afternoon, I will head out to Tractor Supply to pick up a toolbox latch that I ordered a couple of weeks ago. Heck, I may even go crazy and get the oil and filter in the pick-up changed!

Unfortunately, summer also means getting visits to the doctor out of the way. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I need a physical exam before getting my cataract removed. That happens next week. The week after that, I see the surgeon who will be removing the cataract. And, of course, there is the dentist. I have a cleaning scheduled next month, as well as the surgery.

We have a couple of Air BnB properties, and Kathy tells me that my loving touch is needed at both. But before I become the maintenance man who travels, I need to do a little work around the house here in Madison. I should start by mowing the lawn.

Let’s not forget that the Chile Today Hot Tamale festival season picks up in the summer. We will be in Highlands, NC, June 23 and 24. Those of you enjoying the cool mountain air in or near Highlands please stop by and see us.

The upside to summer is that my stress level goes down. The downside to summer is that I tend to get into Kathy’s hair more frequently. (There is something to that whole “absence makes the heart grow fonder” thing.) But recently, I took steps to avoid any trouble.

Puppy dog Lucy now has a brand-spanking new dog cage in the back yard. (It isn’t clear to me exactly why we needed to put a 10 x 10 x 6 feet chain link cage in the middle of our fenced-in back yard, but Kathy wanted it, and you don’t argue with her about things for Lucy.) We leave the door open most of the time, and Lucy loves it. We have it under some shade trees. She dug a nice little pit in the red Georgia clay, and she frequently chills in the pit, in the cage. She has it made.

And this summer, so do I. If a little too much togetherness causes me to get under Kathy’s skin, I now have a nice place to sleep!